Month: February 2017

The longest biog­ra­phy in his­to­ry takes a long step to com­ple­tion with pub­li­ca­tion of The Churchill Doc­u­ments, Vol. 19, Fate­ful Ques­tions, Sep­tem­ber 1943-April 1944. (Order your copy here). Fas­tid­i­ous­ly com­piled by the late Sir Mar­tin Gilbert and edit­ed by Dr. Lar­ry Arnn, these 2700 pages serve up anoth­er fresh con­tri­bu­tion of doc­u­ments cru­cial to our under­stand­ing of Churchill in World War II. It is a vast new con­tri­bu­tion to Churchill schol­ar­ship.

Win­ston S. Churchill, the offi­cial biog­ra­phy con­sists of eight nar­ra­tive vol­umes and now nine­teen com­pan­ion or doc­u­ment vol­umes, all kept in print and offered at mod­est prices as both hard­back and elec­tron­ic edi­tions.…

Sir Mar­tin wrote that in research for the book, he and Lady Gilbert found the grave of Pri­vate William McBride, Roy­al Inniskilling Fusiliers, killed April 1916, two months before the Somme. Whether this was the grave of Eric Bogle’s sub­ject is imma­te­r­i­al.…

A col­league asks if it’s true that Churchill com­rade Jack Seely was “arrest­ed for arro­gance” in the Boer War! It doesn’t sound to either of us like an arrestable offense, but fits the character—a lord­ly aris­to­crat-adven­tur­er, and thus almost inevitable Friend of Win­ston. Churchill and Seely, cir­ca 1912.

A Churchill biog­ra­ph­er, Esme Wing­field-Strat­ford, agreed: “Gal­lant Jack Seely, from the Isle of Wight…a light-heart­ed gam­bler with death, was about the one man who could claim a record to com­pare with that of Win­ston him­self.”

C.N True­man thinks that Jack Seely could not have lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry.…